I was wondering why my windscreen had a round circle on the drivers side the other day. The sun caught it and I could see a rainbow ring. Didn't think much of it.

Then today someone posted a photo on the 4L forum about Clever Citroen.

Ingenious

Am i missing something stupidly obvious?

James,they have built some sort of saftey thingy into it,so if it shatters,you can still see where you are going.

yes
in the olden days we had to put up with toughened windscreens - they were heat treated so they had stresses in them when they broke they shattered into 1000s of tiny pieces that generally covered you in little cuts. Un treated glass would shatter into huge jugular slicing daggers. Now its laminated 2 thin sheets of un treated glass sandwiching a tough plastic, the glass breaks in big pieces but no exposed edges to lacerate. The tension within the toughened glass caused refraction and hence the ranibow effect. When shattered you cant see though a toughened screen so decent manufacturers made zones in the sight of the driver so that you could steer to safety - see the pic above.

Sean

I thought that was it but thought it may be too obvious to be that

Clever French

tgat?

not just French seem to remember Minis and 1100s having "Zebrazone" windscreens so named because they looked stripy in sunlight. you got vertical bars of clearer glass when the inevitable happened.

I had an Acad windscreen go once and there was certainly no safety zone on that. There was an almighty bang and I suddenly couldn't see a bloody thing.

Oh standards have dropped on those modern cars